June 10, 2013

Despite some of the largest oil reserves on the planet and freedom from a US embargo like the one that beset Cuba, it turns out that Venezuela is an equally sad example of what a socialist paradise looks like. Food, medicine, toilet paper, and dollars are either impossible to find or priced out of anyone’s ability to afford them. Growth in this year’s first quarter clocked in at less than a percentage point, with GDP expected to contract by one percent at year’s end. Year after year, a vicious cycle spawned by a labyrinth of price and currency controls cuts off the oxygen supply to Venezuela’s import-dependent economy and ends up making goods more scarce and inflation more severe.

The only people who get richer are the apparatchiks and their cronies. But electorates fall for it on a regular basis, because — thanks to the human faults of envy and greed — although it’s a failure as policy, it’s a successful con.